Eloqua Cloud Connectors – Buy versus Build?

You need a cloud connector, and eventually you may need several. You have bright people in the computer room – they’re pretty good – so you ask yourself, why can’t they put something together? Or maybe you have an existing partner who is more than willing to custom program a cloud connector for you.

After all, do you really need to spend all that money on a professionally built Cloud Connector?

Here are a few reasons you may not have thought of:

Turnover: Managing home-built cloud connectors requires a trained and skilled programmer and preferably the very one that programmed it. Of course, turnover occurs in all companies. Two years is average! When your Cloud Connector needs to be updated, where will your programmer be? Keep in mind that 4Thought Marketing’s business is Cloud Connectors. We have multiple folks capable of addressing and fixing any Cloud Connector issues at any point in time.

Speed to Deployment: When you buy an existing customer-proven cloud connector, you’ll have a minimal deployment time and most importantly, there’s no testing and re-programming time. 4Thought Marketing Cloud Connectors work right the first time because they’ve been used and tested by multiple customers.

Features: It’s unlikely that your internal IT department will build the robust features that have been suggested and incorporated by various 4Thought Marketing clients over years of usage. Also, it is frequently the case with pre-built cloud connectors that additional valuable features will be made available to you as time goes on. Quite simply, there’s power in the numbers of the multiple customers behind 4Thought Marketing Cloud Connectors.

Reliability: A flow of leads is only as reliable as its weakest link. Cloud connectors are typically considered of minor importance to an internal IT department and frequently they’re either deployed on a server stuck in the corner, or relegated to sharing a server with more important applications.

Do you want one small link in your pipeline – a simple cloud connector – to delay the movement of your data? Data that is the cornerstone of the lead flow of all marketing and sales?

4Thought Marketing’s professional Cloud Connectors are running on multiple redundant servers on opposite sides of the United States, with automated failover, all monitored by a 24×7 Cloud Connector Monitoring Portal.

Maintenance: We fix even small bugs in our Cloud Connectors free of charge. Not by the hour as a partner would, or as a secondary priority like an IT department might. And don’t kid yourself: bugs will show up weeks, months, even years after deployment. A connector that has been debugged by multiple customers, and funded by multiple customers, is fixed faster, more reliably and less expensively than trying to reinvent the wheel in-house.

Hardware: An internally-deployed Cloud Connector will typically require a server, a Windows Server Operating system, and Microsoft IIS, along with security software, network configuration, and other infrastructure components that can all be more easily handled “in the cloud.”

These need to be patched, upgraded, maintained and even fixed at times. When you buy cloud connectors from 4Thought Marketing, we share these costs among hundreds of running Cloud Connectors. Does it make sense for you to do it for one? Or will you just slap it alongside other running applications and hope for the best?

Experience: The Eloqua API is pretty good, but we’ve build all sort of exception and compensation mechanisms to compensate for various gaps and limitations in it. Your IT team won’t have that experience on day one. We’ve earned it by building almost 100 cloud connectors and living through 5 years and dozens of customers’ worth of experience. How much will it cost you and your IT team both in IT man-hours to gain that type of experience? More importantly, how much will inefficiencies in sales and marketing while the problems and solutions are uncovered?

API Changes: Our continued success demands that we maintain our Cloud Connectors. In October of 2013 Eloqua changed their API substantially and we had to reprogram our system before that change launched, just to keep our customer’s systems running properly. This means we keep on top of all API update bulletins coming from our vendors, and anticipate the required updates before they throw errors into your pipeline. Is your team or partner prepared to do that for one Custom Cloud Connector? Will they make those updates free of charge? Are they as motivated to do that as a company dedicated to Eloqua Cloud Connectors?

Conclusion:

Is building Eloqua Cloud Connectors and working with the Eloqua API your company’s best use of resources? Is it your core competency? It IS ours!

It just makes sense to allow 4Thought Marketing to provide your Cloud Connectors – it’s faster, safer, and less expensive. It is a good business decision.